Milan

Alison Smith is a passionate educator who is motivated in promoting bilingual education using phonics as a backbone in developing language skills. Alison began her career as a researcher in Microbiology until she discovered her love of teaching children. This passion has developed over the last eight years, resulting in the formation of a highly successful English school in downtown Milan. Since 2012, Alison has worked not only as a teacher, but as the director and has developed the class curriculum for children ages 3 to 13. With the success of the language school, Alison has come to understand the importance of training and is dedicated to spreading her experience. Trainees will be followed for one year with monthly newsletters and access to content in order to enrich their teaching experience using Jolly Phonics in a bilingual classroom.

Diego Zaffaroni is an international educator and consultant. He is qualified to teach in the UK and Italy; he worked for five years as a Bilingual Education School Coordinator, a project supported jointly by the British Council and the Italian Ministry of Education. Diego has experienced leadership roles at an innovative Cambridge school in Milan and an IB World School in Kurdistan, Iraq and was actively involved in the development of projects in International Education and English Language Teaching in the Middle East and Europe. He was Dean of Academics and PYP Coordinator at a newly established IB school in Mumbai which is part of a well-known group of schools across India. His training and consultancy experience has developed over ten years across three continents. He is studying to earn an MA Education from Durham University. Diego has seen better and better results with Jolly Phonics over the years he and his fellow teachers have used it; Jolly Phonics has been a key element in making sure that no child is left behind. Diego’s strong interest in working with teachers and school leaders let him grow as a teacher trainer and consultant, focusing on literacy and multilingual education, creativity, and the development of teachers and leaders’ key strengths. Top Strengths*: Developer – Restorative – Learner – Individualisation – Empathy – Achiever. Countries where he offers training and consultancy services: In-person and mixed mode online/in-person Egypt, Italy, Albania, Switzerland, Kurdistan (Iraq), India. Keen to collaborate actively with school leaders and educators in other countries. Online, synchronous and asynchronous The world. *As indicated from Gallup Clifton Strengths Assessment

Como

Elisabetta is highly experienced in working with children of different ages in private and public schools. She opened and managed three bilingual nursery schools for 10 years. She started her own Language Academy in 1998, counting now over 200 students from the age of three. After attending the British Council training programme, she has been nominated Supervisor for the BEI (Bilingual Education Italy) project at the school where she teaches. She has been using Jolly Phonics and Jolly Grammar with spectacular results for the last four years, and she has gathered that English Phonics awareness is a milestone in teaching English to young learners. She will be pleased to teach Jolly Phonics to teachers and parents all around Italy.

Milan

Hannah Stibbe is a passionate and qualified ESL educator, originating from the UK where she gained a degree in French and Italian (University of Leicester) and a Trinity CertTESOL qualification before moving to Italy in 2006. Over the years she has specialised in bilingualism in young learners, teaching English in nursery schools, kindergartens and primary schools. Since discovering Jolly Phonics, Hannah has taught hundreds of Italian children to read and write successfully. She set up and managed a no-profit organisation which provided Jolly Phonics courses to kindergarten and primary schools across Milan for several years. Hannah completed her PGCE (University of Cumbria) in 2021 for which she researched the role of synthetic phonics in early literacy and carried out a small- scale research project on the use of L1 in L2 classrooms. This research gave her extensive background knowledge on the topic of synthetic phonics. She is head of the English department in a primary school in Milan where she introduced Jolly Phonics and contributed to designing the school’s primary English curriculum, which combines Jolly Phonics and Jolly Grammar with the Cambridge Primary English as a Second Language curriculum. She also teaches adult ESL learners, specialising in diction and speaking skills and runs a speaking club that holds various English-speaking events in Milan. Hannah is keen to share her knowledge of synthetic phonics and pass her experience using the Jolly Phonics programme on to other teachers to give them a better understanding of it and how to implement it in their classrooms.

Como, Lombardy Region

Martina has a wealth of experience teaching English as a second language to young learners. During her years of teaching she has always taught with the Jolly Phonics method in the Italian context. The results she has seen over the years have been amazing, especially considering the fact that the children she teaches are not English native speakers. The children create a good relationship with the language due to the way the programme is taught. The children are so engaged and learn to read and write in a foreign language form the age of six years old. Martina cannot wait to spread the Jolly Phonics method to you all!